Back Early Novels and Stories

William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories

Bright Center of Heaven | They Came Like Swallows | The Folded Leaf | Time Will Darken It | stories More

Edited by Christopher Carduff

“At last—at last!—The Library of America brings out the first in a pair of volumes devoted to the writings of the New Yorker editor who in his spare time produced some of America’s most lyrical and poignant fiction.”
— Arts Journal

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News A reading list for “the most deadly pandemic in human history”
June 1, 2020

News Eudora Welty and William Maxwell: Letters formed a fifty-year friendship
April 12, 2016

This title is out of stock and a reprint has not yet been scheduled. Sign up here to receive news about forthcoming titles and reprints.

In 1934, at age 26, William Maxwell left small-town Illinois for New York City, convinced that life and literature were elsewhere. “I had no idea then,” he later wrote, “that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The look of things. The Natural History of home . . . All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story.”

With his second book, They Came Like Swallows (1937), Maxwell found his signature subject matter—the fragility of human happiness—as well as his voice, a quiet, cadenced Midwestern voice that John Updike has called one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction. Set against the background of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, this short novel presents the loving character of Elizabeth Morison, a devoted wife and mother, through the eyes of those whom she is fated to leave decades before her time.

Edmund Wilson described The Folded Leaf (1945) as “a quite unconventional study of adolescent relationships—between two boys, with a girl in the offing—in Chicago and in a Middle Western college: very much lived and very much seen.” He praised this “drama of the immature” for the compassion Maxwell brings to his male protagonists, whose intensely felt, unarticulated bond is beyond their inchoate ability to understand.

Time Will Darken It (1948) is a drama of the mature: a good man’s struggle to keep duty before desire and his family’s needs before his own. It paints a portrait of Draperville, Illinois, in 1912, a proud and isolated community governed by gossip, where an ambitious young woman must not overreach the limits society has placed on her sex, and an older, married gentleman must not encourage her should she dare.

Together with these major works, this Library of America edition of Maxwell’s early fiction collects his lighthearted first novel, Bright Center of Heaven (1934), out of print for nearly 70 years, and nine masterly short stories. It concludes with “The Writer as Illusionist” (1955), Maxwell’s fullest statement on the art of fiction as he practiced it.

Christopher Carduff, editor, is a longtime publishing professional who collaborated with William Maxwell on several of his later projects. He currently serves as the Books Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

William Maxwell: Early Novels & Stories is kept in print with a gift from James H. Duffy to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in honor of Sophia Duckworth Schachter.
Table of Contents

Bright Center of Heaven

They Came Like Swallows

Stories 1938-1945
Homecoming
The Actual Thing
Young Francis Whitehead
Haller’s Second Home
The Patterns of Love

The Folded Leaf

Time Will Darken It

Stories 1952–1956
The Trojan Women
The Pilgrimage
What Every Boy Should Know
The French Scarecrow

The Writer as Illusionist

Appendix
Introduction to They Came Like Swallows
Preface to Time Will Darken It

Or buy from our partners

ISBN: 978-1-59853-016-2 997 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 179 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories LOA N°184

Raymond Carver: Collected Stories LOA N°195

Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir LOA N°102

John Updike: The Collected Stories (boxed set)

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.